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What’s All This, Then?

Link En Fuego is a repository of arbitrarily random (and often useful) links that I found on my many web forays. The subject can range from Dada to dabberlocks, Dacron to ducksauceology.

I opened it because I believe that “it [is] worth pursuing every disparate field [of knowledge] precisely because the fields were not disparate, but branches of knowledge intimately connected to one another…”

and most other things

Monthly Archives: April 2008

Five people sit down to discuss the results of a focus group. Two being the ideas behind a new product that has not yet gone to market, three being department heads of brashCreative, The Art Institute of Portland’s student-run advertising agency.

As the students run through the research breakdown offering their own input and advice it was remarkable how easy it was to read the thoughts of the client. The majority of the conversation focused around the functional requirements of the new product. Every time a new idea or insight came up it was evident in the client’s face that the wheels were turning inside his head. It was actually quite amazing to see how fast he was thinking of how to develop a product that featured some of the suggestions taken from the focus group.

Inspiration was strong among this group. Everyone was building off each other’s ideas. It left us all with a great feeling; a feeling that things were starting to take shape and that this pet project was going to turn into a reality.

I have never been one who enjoyed the process of market research because of its daunting demand for patience, but after this meeting, I have a new desire to explore different research techniques. Ethnographic Research is the method I will begin to explore more thoroughly. Ethnographic research uses fieldwork to understand cultural societies.

The idea of understanding the target audience is important, actually crucial to any marketing/design project. I now have a more dimensional view of market research because I saw exactly how excited the client got when they realized the potential for their product in the eyes of the consumer.

USE AN OBJECTIVE? Some say yes, some say no. If you’re having trouble keeping to one page then definitely no. If you do use an objective make sure it is well written, will fit any job you are interested in and focuses on what you will do for the company

WHY NOT try to “show” your objective through your style/design (if you have a well defined identity, it should come through.)

REFERENCES upon request is optional (it’s considered a given)

GPA/honors etc. may or may not be important—be cautious. Don’t use unless you really think it’s appropriate

Where: The MacForce store, whereupon I, being the overconfident fellow of the road that I was, thought could I find conveniently perched four–five blocks away from the Hawthorne bridge, which it was—if you take the right exit to the bike trail prior to exiting the bridge. Inside: appropriately themed decor—if you’ve seen their print ad on the paper—leaving nothing to the imagination down to the appearance of 50’s sci-fi movie and Apple ][ computer, perched atop a giant striped rocket ship. Okay, I was just kidding about the rocket ship, but that would be extremely cool, wouldn’t it?

What it’s about: Kelly Guimont, while being the online persona @verso, is secretly a type geek who work with Extensis. She gave a presentation on organizing a computer’s font collections, whether you’re a typophile who reads specimen before bed and gets high on printer’s ink or someone who just like to see his/her TTF/Type1/OpenType files sorted by names for easy usage. BONUS: I learned that the speaker had “seven to eight thousand” typefaces. If that isn’t typographically awesome, I don’t know what else is.

This presentation is well-suited to any designer or creative person, especially if he/she works freelance, since, like me, most freelancers have 1) a lot of typefaces installed in their systems, and 2) some forms of ADD or OCD that will cause them to misplace or mismanage their font library from time to time.

A very short summary of insights that I got from the event is thus:

*** BEGIN NOTATION. ***

While fonts are files, it’s best to not think of them as files, but as little programs that consume memory every time you load up.

Therefore, to make your computer run in its full snappy-performance glory, it’s in your best interest to only enable fonts that you and Mac OS X are going to use, which in most cases would be almost no font at all if you’re just going to browse your Facebook for 6 hours that day. This is where a font management program can come in handy, because hello, you don’t want to remove and reinstall fonts every time you’re using it, and besides, don’t even try to argue about how FontBook is a full-fledged font management program because when you have the entire Adobe FontFolio 11 installed in your system, you do not want to Ctrl+highlight+click 2,300 fonts to temporarily disable them, only to have them enabled again when you restarted your Mac.

NOTE: I feel that, since Mrs. Guimont wore a BATTLESTAR HELVETICA T-shirt that night, she will have more authority to explain the rest of the presentation.

*** END NOTATION. ***

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ☝Translation: You can participate, even though you don’t know that the name Mrs. Eaves implies a saucy, illicit, decades-long dalliance that involved many nights of hot letterpress action in the studio basement.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝Translation: the font format and management talk can be technical to some people, but the QuickType is sure to wow any client.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Installing 300 fonts will PWN OSX.

Friday was awesome a gorgeous day at the mountain learning how to snowboard. The sun was gorgeous; I ended up with a pretty good sunburn as well. The next morning I felt as though I had been run over by the car a few times, but all is good.

Today there was some interesting market research for a really exciting client. Every time we go to do some work there is always a million ideas that come up in conversation.

Tonight is homework and application time; also really exciting because of the opportunities available.

If anyone is looking for inspiration on Design and the Design Process check out Watches Tell More Than Time by Del Coates. He explains the concept of Concinnity as related to design and it really hit home for me. I don’t want to try and explain it because he does an excellent job in the first chapter of his book. I would recommend reading it because so far, I agree with everything he has stated about design.

Now it is back to homework. Enjoy this post and i hope it brings some new inspiration about design in general.

Where:eROI’s top floor, wherein I climbed up through the ‘other’ back entrance, which boasted more spacious corridors adorned with paintings, up to what I presume to be the halls of separation between eROI’s design and development teams. Then down. Then up again to the same space where, not incidentally, Mobile Portland was held three weeks ago.

What’s It About: Networking among tech professionals accompanied by a medley of fried chicken wings, kung pao chicken, fried beans, chinese lettuce and fried rice) more than learning about or working on things or drinking beer, for which we have—pardon the shameless self-plug—Collaborative Ingenuity that I hosted every Saturday and Beer and Blog on the day before, respectively.

Anyway, Lunch 2.0 was, in my opinion, one of the best places to talk with people who may not necessarily work in your industry, but who share the same passion about technology, and thus can provide catalysts for generation of new ideas and solutions. You’ll meet old friends or new colleagues, catch up and learn a few things about them, and then, through the conversation that happens, inspire you to better yourself or explore new ideas.

Technicality: ☝Translation: Geek cred not required to get in.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ½Translation: Five fingers for inspiring conversations that spark ideas. Minus half for the large amount of leftover.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Non-alcoholic networking meetup = the new Twitter.

@AllisonM, by day, is one of the smartest working and most dedicated design manager in town. By night, she is a drummer with penchants for moderate politics, songs with unusually high emo overtones and baby carrots.